Walking through an upgrade from Microsoft ConfigMgr 1511 to ConfigMgr 1602

Hi everyone, Pramod Kashyap here. I’m a support engineer here at Microsoft and today I’d like to share some things I learned about upgrading to ConfigMgr 1602. There’s some documentation out there already that talks about the upgrade process from Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager v1511 to Configuration Manager v1602, however I wanted to take the opportunity to go through the process and include some logs and screen shots that may help you better understand the process and troubleshoot it in the off chance that something goes wrong.

Getting Ready

Before we start with the actual upgrade process, let’s first go over a few things that you should know in order to ensure that things so smoothly.

Be aware that you must be running Configuration Manager build 1511 before you can upgrade to build 1602. If you’re running a previous version of ConfigMgr then you must upgrade to 1511, then upgrade to 1602.

Starting the Download

Now that we’re ready to perform the actual upgrade to 1602, we can kick that off from the Updates and Servicing node of the UI:

The download will start automatically and the progress can be tracked in the SMS downloader log as shown in dmpdownloader.log here:

After the upgrade succeeds, you will be asked to close the console if its open, then you will be asked to upgrade the console as well. You’ll want to do this because using an older version of the console can corrupt data. Assuming you click OK at this point, the console is closed and the new console MSI file is downloaded and run. This will remove the older version and install the new version which you can then use to verify your new version of Configuration Manager:

Common Issues

Here are a couple notes covering a couple issues you may face during the upgrade process:

1. Downloading the files: If you experience problems initially downloading the upgrade files, restart SMSEXEC. This will reinitiate the DMP Downloader component which has a default download interval of 1440 minutes (1 day). Note that you can change this interval via the registry value below but only in build 1602. This registry value is not exposed in build 1511 and prior versions.

2. Both during and after the upgrade, keep an eye on the State value in “CM_UpdatePackages” for the package “609F1263-04E0-49A8-940B-09E0E34DE2D2” (Package GUID). This GUID is same in all cases. There have been some instances where the upgrade is successful but the value is not updated and thus it stills shows as being in the Installing state. This will help you track the upgrade process and at what stage it is currently in.

3. Please make sure that you have at least 15GB of free space on the drive. This is one of the prerequisites, and this as well as other checks can be tracked in the ConfigMgrPrereq log. Installation or upgrade process is logged in CMUpdate.log.

4. You may see entries similar to those below continuously in hman.log:

These messages can be ignored, because if you check the version of this package in the CM_UpdatePackages table you’ll see that it is 5.00.8325.1102, which is lower than that of 1602 (which is 5.00.8355.1000) and hence is identified as Not Applicable. Please note that this can also happen even if you have not upgraded to 1602. 10BE05BB-BE45–4D65-8C3D-D12BAC995233 is Exchange connector QFE and won’t be applicable to your site if you didn’t have the on-premise Exchange connector installed.

Should we be running a database upgrade test for 1602? The setup.exe program in \EasySetupPayload\609f1263-04e0-49a8-940b-09e0e34de2d2\SMSSETUP\BIN\X64 errors that TESTDBUPGRADE is not a valid command line option.